hw 30

"Chicken legs."
"Look at them! Paris Hilton would be jealous of those legs of yours."

For as long as I can remember, my grandfather has always had skinny legs and ankles, skinner than those of anyone else I had met. I never really thought of it. I suppose I always assumed that it was because he was old - into his mid-seventies this year - but now that I think of it, something like that doesn't make sense for a man like him. He's always said he'll be dead the day he can't work or lift a digging bar over his head, the grandfather who drives the lawnmower down the road after a Christmas snowstorm, in short, the type of man who some 'getting old cliches' or general-isms just don't seem to fit at all. But while talking to him about how he's been treated differently by doctors or nurses since he was a boy growing up in the depression to know a senior citizen, my mother and I thought about what we were being told and both turned to each other.

"Dad... did you have polio?"

When I heard her, I automatically thought of President Roosevelt who I had heard was crippled by the disease and that was why he needed a wheelchair. As it turns out, such crippling forms of polio are actually a rareity  called paralytic polio, occurring less than 2% of the time. A less serious but slightly more frequent form of polio is non paralytic polio, when the patient can experience a sensitivity to light and stiffness in their neck. Non-paralytic polio happens anywhere from 1-5% of the time. The third and final kind of polio is a much more mild kind named abortive polio where either no symptoms are exhibited or the patient just feels like they have a bad flu.

• What aspect of the dominant social practices around illness & dying did you decide to explore?
• What resource(s) or insight(s) from the unit (if any) connect to this aspect?
• What information did you gather from the internet related to this aspect? Please cite sources.
• How did you explore? What did you do in the real world? Did you enjoy it, contribute to another, see something new? Give us some flavor, show don't tell.
• What did you learn?
• What does this show about dominant social practices of illness & dying in our culture?
• Why does that matter?

HW # 29:

While insurance seems like a capricious and strange thing today, it wasn't always like that. During ancient times, Babylonian merchants and their wares faced a great amount of risks when selling their wares from bandits to weather induced hardships. As a result, a group of them decided to pay into a collective pool of money so that if, for whatever reason, wares were lost they could collect money to cover their loses. The ancient Romans and Greeks expanded the idea. Cohn writes, "The Greeks and Romans extended insurance beyond commerce by creating... pooled contributions from members to fiance burials for the deceased." (Cohn) Centuries later, Benjamin Franklin furthered the idea for a different use and created a girl to insure houses from fires but it wouldn't be until the early 20th century that the idea of health insurance really came into effect.

It was at this time that a standard education and cerification was beginning to be required for doctors.

Sources:
Cohn, Jonathon. Sick. Harper Collins. New York. 2007.
Goffman, Evering. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice Hall. New Jersey. 1963
Staff of Washington Post. Landmark. Public Affairs. New York. 2010

Group Comment Work

My group still has yet to post any recent homework. I've asked them each to do it.  Partner Y.J. says she'll get to it and apologized for the hold up. Partner J.R. said she'd start doing it. Partner J.O was asked today after he had been open and scoffed, shrugged, and said he wouldn't be doing the work because he's transferring schools.

Edit: And as of 8:38 they have yet to review the appropriate hw responses as dictated in class. My father and mother have been unable to comment due to my father having surgery and my mother needing to take care of him. My younger reader talked to me over the phone. She says she "While you did answer the question, you should have gotten deeper with your answers. A little less like this happened and then that happened and more flowing like one of your stories. Some parts were like your stories, and the lastest [sic] part of it seemed a little like you had filled in the blanks for a format."

Visiting an Unwell Person

 "It was four ounces earlier. I held it for an hour and a half, I need to fight the urges for longer." Something like that is something that can typically be heard coming from "Person" in my family. Recently he underwent surgery for problems related to his prostate and suffered several set backs. "Seeing blood there is ... it's scary." While I can certainly understand how seeing blood in your urine can be startling, it's much more terrifying for me to hear someone in my family who I've always looked up to and seen as the strongest person in my family say that a little blood scares him. Getting sick doesn't just disenchant us from the detachment we have from out own bodies; it disenchants us from the Superman masks we place on the ones we love as well.

When I asked Person if I could talk to him about what he was going through, he shook his head and said he didn't want to. I could understand that between the age difference and how relations, it must be an awkward topic for him. To be able to do this assignment, I wound up venturing  into the living room to listen to him talk to my mother and his wife about his problems. While I certainly noticed that most of what he was saying was worries or complaints about being in pain or dehydrated (who could blame him?) I noticed that the conversation was the typically 'word vomit' conversation that my teacher brings up. He wasn't just

Please visit a person that is unwell - sick and/or dying in a hospital, senior home, or elsewhere. You could choose to visit a family member, friend, neighbor, acquaintance, or stranger.

What do you notice about the situation, about the person's approach to being unwell, about your own reactions and thoughts? What social conditions helped to construct this situation? What aspects of this situation simply result from human vulnerability and mortality?

What insights from the book, movies, and/or guest speaker apply to the situation of the person you're visiting?

Please write a 3-5 paragraph narrative account and analysis of your visit. Please maintain the privacy of the person you visit (unless they say otherwise) by leaving them anonymous and with no easily identifiable descriptions. Your goal should be to write an engaging and well-crafted TRUE STORY of the visit with lucid and sharp insights about dominant practices of illness & dying embedded in the story.

Final Thoughts on Illness and Dying Unit

In this unit, I'm not entirely sure if the insights I gained were actually insightful. It seems to me that the nature of this unit and the feelings and actions associated with it are highly subjective. What I might value or see as a new piece of information may in fact be old news to the masses. Additionally, most of the given sources for this unit didn't seem to 'click' in my head. I found the most useful information I gathered came from our class discussions rather than Sicko or Tuesdays with Morrie. Regardless, I found that even in pretend situations like when we were setting up scenes in the beginning of the unit, it's an automatic reaction for us to distance ourselves from the sick and dying. While that makes sense in terms of self preservation, it's also the thought of dying because someone refused to help me when they could have is a scary one.

Another important idea that kept coming up in our discussions was the idea that death happens to happens to all of us and that we should simply accept it. It's easy to say and it's easy believe in when that idea is getting applied to ourselves but what about for other people? Don't mothers and fathers always get devastated when they have to see their child suffer a strong illness or die? Doesn't the majority of people get upset when they hear of bad things happening to children? If your husband or wife was sick, would you really just shrug your shoulders and say "Oh, well. This was going to happen eventually." Does that make us hypocrites? If people are supposed to be selfish, why do we suddenly value the lives of others above our own at times?

Response to Sicko

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